Gadgetory

this episode of TechnoBuffalo is brought to you by the LG twins wash two loads at the same time smart watches smart phones smart cars smart everything and as more and more of these smart objects start to permeate our places of inhabitants we get closer and closer to a truly smart home not smart house like katey sagal in the Disney Channel original movie a smart home like a place where you live that makes your life a little bit easier by automating some of the things that you would normally do on a daily basis anyway well how is a smart home even possible well a lot of devices these days come with some sort of a connectivity option the main one you're probably gonna hear about most often is is what Nest does it's got Wi-Fi connectivity so connects directly of your Wi-Fi network connects directly to the Internet can do things like pull updates find information about the weather see what temperature it is outside do all kinds of fun stuff all over Wi-Fi but if you want to have some conversations between the devices in your home locally you're gonna need a different technology because Wi-Fi needs to go to the Internet and then back down so what you have in terms of local mesh connectivity is two things z-wave which is a proprietary platform that's owned by a company but a lot of platforms excuse me a lot of devices do still support and then you've got ZigBee which is an open source platform that a lot of devices also support many devices support both z-wave and ZigBee and of course you're gonna need a way for those devices to have a home base somewhere to control them from so you're gonna need some sort of a hub whether it's a smart things hub or a wink hub there's a number of options on the market these days and once you have those things all in the same place on the same network those devices can start to have conversations with not one or another for example when I leave the house my nest goes into auto-away mode so it's set to make sure that all the lights are turned off when I'm not home when I come home it comes from a way mode to home mode and then once it hits home it sends a message to our lights through so through smart things to turn the lights on because we've come home you can do all kinds of other things too with hubs if you have a device that's z-wave or ZigBee enabled you can yet for example a door contact so that when the door opens up it'll send a message to smart things you can do things like motion sensors so if someone is broken into your home it'll set an alarm off or send you a text or send you a phone call you can also do things like moisture sensors so you can set up really cool stuff at home with like a Raspberry Pi stick a moisture sensor into one of your important plants when it needs water you can set it to automatically water itself or at the very least send you a text when it needs it there's also one other platform that's on its way that was announced from Google this past year at i/o Google we've is is the latest entry into the sort of Internet of Things mesh network situation that we're looking to build in our homes we've is also open source just like Google's stuff tends to be and Android is basically shrunk down to run on tiny tiny devices whether it be a dishwasher or coffee machine or in this case a washing machine it doesn't actually run on the LG twin wash line but they do have a lot of connectivity they've got NFC and Wi-Fi on these things and they're actually really nice washers it's a front-loading washer and you can get a cute little tiny pedestal washer for underneath it as well so you can do two loads at the same time but since it's Wi-Fi enabled it'll let you know on your phone when your run is done it'll also allow you to do things like download cycles from the internet like from a curated list if you need to do you know colored stuff or you need to do all whites or just delicates or certain kinds of fabrics you can download those cycles from the internet and you can just wash watch no not wash you don't want to wash your washing machine in progress you want to watch your wash in progress which you can totally do from the app but that's all that there's all kinds of other devices that we can do in our home these days you can get a Wi-Fi enabled coffee machines so that when your alarm goes off in the morning your coffee is already going by the time you go downstairs you can get a nest protect which is basically very similar to a nest but it's focused on carbon monoxide and smoke detection and you can get something like a Luna will actually used to be called a Luna now it's called an eight this is a project on IndieGoGo a while back my parents actually got me one for my wedding we don't have it just yet but a network-enabled mattress cover so it actually uses a ton of sensors to track the way that you sleep make sure that you wake up at the right time in between REM cycles and it even heats the bed for you and that's a great way to let your coffee maker know when you've actually gotten out of bed so as more and more of these things that we would tend to have in our homes become Wi-Fi and connectivity enabled we get closer and closer and closer to a smart home which I for one think is incredibly cool but what do you guys think is a smart home something that you're excited or about or are you like my wife and think that's probably a little more on the grid than you would like to be if you're into smart homes let me know what devices you have at home I would love to hear your experiences with a wink hub because my smartthings hub is pretty old since it's a backer version I need to replace it soon anyway anyway thank you guys so much for watching I really appreciate you guys taking the time be kind to one another and I'll catch you in the next video